It's the late 1960's and I'm 17 years old, sitting in a chain store restaurant locked in a staring contest with the reigning champ, a beautiful girl with large dark eyes. Part of our after school hang-out routine was staring at each other from nearby tables till one or the other would flinch or laugh. I could beat everyone but her, sometimes going as long as 20 minutes without looking away, but eventually a grin would spill across my face and I'd lose. This kind of thing went on for months. Finally, I discovered her secret.I had heard about telepathy and all that "nonsense," and though I was somewhat skeptical about it, in my quest to win the crown as the ruling stare-down champ I was open to considering any possibility. On one particular day, once again locked in eye to eye combat with the stare-down queen, a joke I'd heard earlier that day came to mind. It was the kind of joke that would make any woman blush, so I concentrated on the punch line and stared. A moment later she giggled, slightly, enough for me to call it a defeat but she demanded a re-match. Once again I concentrated on the funny punch line and this time she broke up laughing. Ah, triumph! And a new piece of knowledge: telepathy was 'probably' real. I would need much more solid evidence to be sure.
A few days later I found myself discussing the subject of telepathy with my friend Chuck. We were sitting in his old Plymouth, parked in my father's driveway at about two in the morning, smoking hashish. (Hashish is slightly sticky, light brown to black substance derived through concentrating the oils and pollen of marijuana plants. This is not the place to argue the morality or effectiveness of mood altering chemicals in the pursuit of spiritual development, since they can have both positive and negative effects and the subject is far too complicated for simple explanation. I am simply reporting the facts relative to the experience being described.) Getting back to the story . . . We thought that being high might give us an edge toward opening up our psychic abilities (if such abilities existed) and decided to attempt communicating a letter of the alphabet telepathically.
With both of us facing the dashboard, we closed our eyes, then I chose the letter 'R' and began to concentrate. Chuck sat silently for a minute, then two minutes, then five. All this time I continued concentrating on the letter 'R'. I could visualize it quite clearly, seeing it in various sizes, both the capital and lower case, in different fonts or styles, different colors, rotating the image 3-dimensionally, etc., yet after nearly ten minutes Chuck had said nothing. I opened my eyes to look at him and saw that his eyes were still closed, his head bobbing gently, rhythmically, in deep concentration, so I went back to visualizing the letter. Finally the wait became so frustrating I no longer cared if he guessed correctly or not. I wanted to quit, and in a final effort I thought to myself, "Can't you get it through your head, the letter is -- "
" R !!!," he screamed, and I mean he literally screamed the letter.
I just sat there with my mouth open, hardly able to believe it, shaking my head and staring at my feet on the floor of the car. It's one thing to believe that something as apparently non-physical as mental telepathy could be a reality, but to know that with absolute certainty, well, that just blew me away. It implied that other "cosmic" phenomenon might also be true aspects of reality, which meant that reality was something different from what I had always believed. The knowledge was changing my life in that moment.
Perhaps half a minute passed before Chuck asked, "That was the letter wasn't it?" It wasn't till then that I realized he had screamed the letter while having no way to be sure he was correct, till I verified it vocally. We tried to duplicate that first success about ten more times, failing every time, but the intensity of the first experience was convincing beyond any further doubt, at least to us. Remember the staring contests?
With the 'R' experience to back up my confidence, I went the rounds with all the gang defending my hard won title as the stare down champ, using that opportunity to test this new knowledge. I'd wait for a few minutes, staring people down, thinking about nothing in particular, then concentrate on something funny. Every time I did my opponents would smile or laugh. I asked why, but no one could remember thinking of anything funny. They simply felt a sudden desire to laugh. But when the girl who was once the stare down queen admitted to thinking about something funny as her way of winning staring contests, I felt certain telepathy must be involved. I decided to see if I could consciously receive as well as transmit.
I began to approach people saying, "Let me see if I can read your mind." I'd stare into their eyes and say whatever came to mind. It wasn't long before I began to notice a logical pattern developing. I could often see from the expression on their face that they were highly skeptical that such a thing was possible, so I'd say, "You're thinking I probably can't do this." Then their train of thought would generally take one of two branches. They would either consider that I had made a purely logical guess, or mentally acknowledge that I had "perceived" correctly. I'd tell them, correctly, which of those two thoughts had occurred to them. Perhaps up to this point I was still relying heavily upon facial expressions, but from then on the situation would rapidly become more intense .
Having hit two in a row the next logical statement would be, "Now you're beginning to think I might actually be able to do this," which further intensified their impression that perhaps I could. This is where they would try to think of something specific in order to make it more difficult for me. "You're looking for something more specific to think about in order to make things more difficult for me," I'd say. At this point most people would begin to feel a bit uncomfortable, but lock onto a specific thought. "You're thinking of the slippers your grandmother used to keep under her bed," I'd say, or some other impossible to predict idea. I would be correct often enough to impress myself greatly. When I was, I usually found myself saying something like, "Now you're convinced I can do this and you're worried I'll pry my way into your closet of little secrets."
Woah! This is when the vibes would become so intense, and so unpleasant, that the subject of my scrutiny would want to terminate the experiment. I was on quite an ego trip in those days however, and I'd keep going just to show off. "You want out of this. You feel helpless because I have an ability you don't have. Ah, here comes a little secret." Under such intense, consciousness focusing conditions as these, it was easy to perceive telepathically. If you can remember a time when someone in a really bad mood came into a room you were in, you'll remember how quickly everyone else noticed. Loud emotions, and their associated mental images, are quite easy to pick up on.
I did this "drive them into the ground" telepathy thing with about a dozen or so people over the course of the next few days. Even though I would start out using facial expressions as cues to what they might be thinking, by the time I started telling them things quite "impossible" to simply have guessed, I would, every time, eventually find myself being psychically overwhelmed with the most unpleasant emotions you can imagine, turned up to 11. I thought I was "way cool" for awhile, but soon began to hate experiencing the intense helplessness those people were suffering. And when it got around that I could read minds I noticed another horrendous draw back. I was more or less exiled.
People were terrified of me. I'd walk into the restaurant beaming my big arrogant grin, ready for a good time showing off, and everyone would go into a kind of shock. Their fear would focus their attention very intensely and I would "pick up" on that fear, that resentment, that struggle to think of non-personal things. They hated me, at least half the time. The rest of the time they'd be proud to know a guy who could "read minds." They would introduce me as "the mind reader" and I'd do my little trick with their friends, who would end up overwhelming me with those terrible vibes and from then on avoid me like the plague.
It only lasted a week before I quit. I purposely avoided allowing myself to pick up on any psychic information and it took a couple of months for my social life to get back to normal, more or less. Two years later, when I realized my mistake was a lack of mental etiquette (and pure obnoxious egotism) I began to work at telepathy again. This time I mellowed out my ego and looked for ways to teach others how to do it themselves. I no longer pry into a person's mind with those attention focusing methods I just mentioned, so the results have not been as consistently impressive, but I understand why they aren't, and that's perfectly ok with me.
The technique developed over a period of years as I began to observe that consistent effects happened as I stared into the eyes of other people, trying to "read their minds." People often commented on seeing my face "change" as we looked at each other. I didn't think much about that at first, since I was also experiencing visual distortions, which I took to be normal peripheral vision effects. Then one time I saw someone's face suddenly become more than blurry. It took on radical hallucinatory characteristics. The person I was looking at was essentially replaced with the image of a very scary looking creature. At that precise moment the other person nearly screamed, jerking away from me, blinking to regain normal vision, telling me I had just "turned into" a very scary looking creature. It struck me as more than a coincidence that we had seen similar perceptions at the same moment, and later I noticed that this was the case with the "normal" blurriness associated with peripheral vision as well. I realized that by telling the other person when I saw a visual change occur, and how intense that change was, I was at the same time describing the visual changes the other person was experiencing. Somehow our subjective perceptions were connected; they were being duplicated. The intuitive sensation I experienced told me our awareness was not just connected, but merged.
If we consider visual perception for a moment, an interesting observation can be made. Focus your eyes upon any single word on this page, then, without taking your eye off that word, try to read another word several inches away from the word your eyes are focused upon. You will realize that you cannot read the word in your peripheral vision. At a distance of a foot or two, the size of the area of clear focus is only an inch or two in diameter. If you look across the room and focus upon a particular object, your area of clear perception is only 4 to 6 inches across. You can not see the rest of the room with true clarity. However, if you simply glance around the room, everything seems to be in clear focus.
It is obvious that visual perception involves a subconscious process where our brain takes in a few bits of clear perception, makes associations based upon our experience, and then constructs a coherent mental image of our environment which we then perceive. If you have ever watched a motion picture and found yourself unable to tell what you were looking at, until the camera zoomed out, or something moved, you can see how our past associations are intimately involved in our ability to recognize the nature of what we perceive visually. Our subconscious locks onto seeming consistencies, seeking to organize the bits of information available into coherent images we can comprehend.
The Psychic Window Technique seeks to reverse this process, by placing concentration upon the inconsistencies in our perception instead.
If you focus your eyes upon a small object nearby, and stare at it for a minute or two concentrating on observing the flaws in you perception, you will notice, eventually, that the object appears to "move" slightly, or drifts in and out of focus, that distortions occur in your peripheral vision. This "appears" to be no more than an effect of tired eyes or whatever. But when you stare into another person's eye in a similar manner, the "changes" in the perception occur more quickly, more intensely, and they happen to both of you at the same time. Not only do these visual anomalies happen to each observer simultaneously, but the constant fluctuations in the intensity of the changes are duplicated exactly by both individuals.
This is an extremely important point, and though I really dislike reading repetitive material I will often be referring to the fact that these changes occur at the same time and have the same level of intensity. It is not just the blurriness that fluctuates in this way, but the distortions take on characteristics of highly organized "other images," also at the same time and with the same level of intensity.
I would like to describe the most intense experience I have had (so far) while using the Psychic Window Technique, but first I need to provide a general description of the technique so you will have a better idea of how it works. The specific details will be explained shortly.